I sure am glad that I found this site. It is great! My hat goes off to those administering the site and to all the contributors!

A number of years back I used to belong to the Flyfish@ mailing list. It got to be too much for me to keep up with and with a job change I fell out of the internet flyfishing world. Recently I have gotten back in though - primarily as a result of finding this website- and I have been enjoying it greatly. Till now I've been one of the lurkers - dying to participate- but wanting to learn a bit before jumping in.

Most of my flyfishing experience has been fishing dryflys here in upstate NY (Oatka Creek and the Catskills). Last March I was down in New Orleans and took the opportunity to go out after redfish. I hooked up with a couple of nice fish and now I have been bitten by the saltwater bug - big time.

Just over a week ago I took the family out to Chatham for a week long vacation. I used the archive of striper patterns on this site to tie up a bunch of flies (along with some from the Caolo book) and as a result had a very successful first outing on the beach. I was very happy with the outcome- catching my first striper and bluefish and am now eager to get back again soon.

I look forward to conversing online with you all and hopefully can pay back those of you who unknowingly helped me with my first striper outing.

I too was a FF@ veteran and could not manage the email inbox overload years ago - in fact that helped me decide to start this site. A BB lets one read what they want whereas mail lists give you everything and let you sift thru it. Great community on FF@ though, those were great years.

Chatham is definitely my favorite little drinking town with a fishing problem. Glad you had a good visit, make sure you let us know ahead of time and we'll hook up.

We are equally curious about upstate NY fishing, please keep us tuned in on that front as well. I'd love to hold a Catskills clave or something one of these days. A de-salination calve for many of us on the coast

Welcome and glad you had luck in Chatham. As the season of the sand eel moves into full swing down there keep a good supply of Deep eels... there are truly a great fly. Hope to bump into you some time.